Internal bug tracking tickets - Redmine, Trac, or JIRA

Question

I've been looking at setting up Redmine, Trac, or JIRA to track issues. I want to be able to have my development team create internal tickets that are never seen by clients, while clients can create/edit tickets that are seen by the internal team.

From the Trac documentation, you can set permissions to create or view tickets, but it doesn't seem to allow for viewing only certain tickets. It may be possible with Trac Fine Grained Permissions, but doesn't appear so.

The Redmine documentation mentions:

Define your own roles and set their permissions in a click

but doesn't appear to have the level of granularity.

From the JIRA documentation:

At the moment JIRA is only able to support security at a project level or issue level. Currently there is no field level security available.

According to this question, Redmine doesn't support internal tickets, so you would have to use multiple projects. I don't want a situation where I would have to create multiple projects - one internal, one external and have the external tickets brought into the internal repository. It seems as this would lead to unnecessary overhead and inevitably, the projects wouldn't be in sync. Is there any way with any of these products (possibly through a plug-in if not in the core product itself) to specify these permissions, or simplify having two projects with different users and permissions that must still share information?

Answer 1

In redmine we just use sub-projects for external access.

All ticket of the sub project are also visible to the parent project where the developpers have full access...

Works with no problems

Answer 2

Jira has quite a bit of visiblity control, I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly.

Here is a link I found that talks about it: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Configuring+Issue-level+Security

You would have one project and then you can use issue types to hide certain things from the public. You can also make comments internal or public, I believe.

Answer 3

Jira has "Issue Security Levels" that allow you to do what you want (see link quoted in another answer).

• One limitation is that subissues inherit the security level of their parent, I have not found it to be significant
• I recommend using Project Roles to designate the internal and external team members, not Groups (else you'll end up with a couple of groups per project, leading to too many groups)
• the restriction you quoted (no field level security) has no effect on what you want to do
• Issue Types have no relation to security levels

Answer 4

Sounds like you want the private tickets plugin for Trac. This will allow you to make it so that clients can only see the tickets they have reported, and not tickets other clients have reported.

Answer 5

CounterSoft Gemini does what you need.

Whitepaper that may help you as you set up external project participants: http://countersoft.com/downloads/whitepapers/Implementing_an_Issue_Management_Platform.pdf

Answer 6

Redmine 1.2 has "private" tickets.

Answer 7

JIRA is your best bet. We use it extensively and can create internal tickets or private tickets with significant granularity, but admittedly not to the field level. You could possibly write a plug-in to achieve that.

Have a quick read of a blog post on the comparison: http://blog.pineywoodstech.com/index.php/2011/12/jira-issue-tracking-for-the-masses/